Interactionism and Crime

Question 1

Cicourel: Typifications

Answer 1

• Police typifications of what a criminal looked like impacted who they labelled as criminal
• resulted in them seeing middle class and working class juvenile behaviour differently, even if they were the same
• same for the CJS, w/c youths were repeat offenders

Question 2

Cicourel: Negotiation of Justice

Answer 2

• Justice is not fixed but negotiable
-> w/c youths are less likely to be chatgef since they do not fit “criminal typifications

Question 3

Cicourel: Crime Statistics

Answer 3

• O.S do not give a valid picture of the patterns of crime, therefore they cannot be used as facts
• sociologists should use crime statistics as topics to investigate and to not take them as face value

Question 4

Alternative Statistics

Answer 4

• Victim surveys: people are asked what crimes they have been victim of
•BCS
• Self-report study: people are asked what crimes they have committed

Question 5

Dark figure of Crime

Answer 5

• Unreported Crime
• Unrecorded Crime
• Undetected Crime
• the difference between the official statistics and the “true” rate of crime

Question 6

Lemert: Primary Deviance

Answer 6

Primary deviance relates to acts which have not been publicly labelled as deviant as they are widespread and largely trivial
• little significance on status and self-concept

Question 7

Lemert: secondary deviance

Answer 7

Acts which have been publicly labelled as deviant and thus it is a result of societal reaction
• once a person is labelled, others may come to see this person only in terms of their label, this becomes their master status
• the master status becomes a controlling identity that overrides all others
• Provokes hostile reactions and reinforces an ”outsider” status
• May lead to a deviant career/ deviant subculture

Question 8

Deviance Amplification

Answer 8

Describes a process in which the attempt to control deviance leads to an increase in deviance

Question 9

Young (1971): hippies and marijuana use

Answer 9

• Smoking was a small element of hippie culture
• Labelling turned hippies into a deviant subculture where drug use like smoking marijuana became the centre
-> as a result more hippies took drugs

Question 10

Shaming

Answer 10

Disintegrative Shaming: not only the crime but also the criminal is labelled as bad and the offender is excluded from society
Reintegrative Shaming: the crime is labelled as bad but the criminal is not

Disintegrative Shaming leads to further crime and deviance since people will internalise the negative label and thus want to deviate more